Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Preface

The idea for this volume arose during a conversation between the two editors,
one of whom was looking toward the end of her career, the other just beginning
his. Both had wondered independently what had become—nearly two
decades hence—of the ambition to found a new field of study within the American
academy as stated in the landmark volume...

Introduction

It would be of little exaggeration to say that much of Russian discourse in the
imperial and early émigré periods (circa 1721–1927) was informed by the
lexicon, liturgy, and theology of Russian Orthodoxy. The Church’s extensive
educational system, whatever its many failings, trained thousands of clergy and
hundreds of theologians who spoke to the faithful in various Russian Orthodox...

Part I: Thinking Orthodox in the Church

The reforms of Tsar Peter I (ruled 1682/1689–1725) marked the onset not
only of modern Russian history but also of the modern history of the Russian
Church. Already in the late seventeenth century, and with greater intensity in
the early eighteenth, Russia began to confront the challenge and allure of European
civilization. Through a series of social, institutional, and cultural reforms,
Peter...

2. Theology on the Ground: Dmitrii Bogoliubov, the Orthodox Anti-Sectarian Mission, and the Russian Soul

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, no one would have thought
of the Russian Orthodox Church’s “internal” mission as a site for “religious
thought.” Certainly, missionaries would seem by nature unlikely to be theologically
adventurous types. This was particularly the case for members of the
Church’s internal mission, whose task was defined not so much in terms of...

A favorite maxim for modern Orthodox theologians is the statement by Evagrius
Ponticus that “[i]f you are a theologian, you will pray truly; if you pray
truly, you will be a theologian.”1 This statement is frequently appealed to by
such theologians to claim that Orthodox theology is rooted in direct personal
experience of God, which they contrast to Western theology as primarily an...

Part II: Thinking Orthodox in the Academy

4. V. D. Kudriavtsev-Platonov and the Making of Russian Orthodox Theism

With the exception of Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) (1782–1867), perhaps no
churchman’s career shaped Russian Orthodox institutions and thought more
than that of Viktor Dmitrievich Kudriavtsev-Platonov (1828–91) (hereafter
Kudriavtsev). The son of a regimental priest, Viktor Dmitrievich led an itinerant
early life. He was born in the province of Pskov and was educated in various...

5. The Struggle for the Sacred: Russian Orthodox Thinking about Miracles in a Modern Age

In 1912, a group of parishioners from the church of Saint Nicholas in the Siberian
diocese of Eniseisk embarked on a year-long campaign against local diocesan
and central Church authorities in Saint Petersburg to prevent the removal
of an icon of the Mother of God named “The Joy of All Who Sorrow” from
their parish church. That year, a young peasant girl and her uncle had found...

6. “The Light of the Truth": Russia’s Two Enlightenments, with Reference to Pavel Florenskii

The essays in this collection bear witness to a fundamental tension within Russian
Orthodoxy of the modern period. Indeed this tension arises from Russia’s
engagement with modernity from the late seventeenth century onward, and is
fundamentally about Orthodoxy’s response to modernity. In the broadest terms
it can be characterized as the tension between reason and faith, but this alone...

Part III: Thinking Orthodox in Society and Culture

7. Written Confession and Religious Thought in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia

The development of written confession in Russia breaks down a number of conventions.
The boundaries between speaking and writing, reading and listening,
theology and devotion, autobiography and literature, absolver and penitent,
rarely seem as porous as they do in the written exchanges between elite Russian
women and their confessors from the mid-1820s to the mid-1850s. These texts...

8. Anagogical Exegesis: The Theological Roots of Russian Hermeneutics

This chapter examines the conceptual and emotional apparatus with which
Russians approached the reading of texts during an era in which a secular literary
culture began to challenge the dominance of religiously enculturated
interpretative paradigms. It looks, firstly, at the interpretation of Holy Scripture
in the school of Metropolitan Platon (Levshin, 1737–1812) and, secondly, at...

9. Kant and the Kingdom of Ends in Russian Religious Thought (Vladimir Solov’ev)

Perhaps more than most of the world’s great religious philosophers, Vladimir
Solov’ev was concerned to reconcile faith and reason. As he put it in one of his
better-known statements, his aim was “to justify the faith of our fathers by raising
it to a new level of rational consciousness.”1 His first major effort to construct
a synthesis of faith and reason was...

In imperial Russia, liberal preoccupations and Orthodox faith did not cluster
naturally together. What Paul Valliere has called “the culture of wholeness”
associated with the Orthodox Christian concern for moral unity within society,
and individual self-realization within a community of believers, was often in
direct tension with certain liberal predispositions toward the...

11. What Is Beauty? Pasternak’s Adaptations of Russian Religious Thought

In a central scene in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (Doktor Zhivago, 1956),
we witness through the eyes of the eponymous protagonist a folk healer healing
a sick cow named “Beauty” (Krasava). Zhivago is surprised to find himself captivated
by the “nonsensical” spell the healer Kubarikha improvises from ancient
chronicles, “transformed through layer upon layer of distortion into apocrypha.”
Despite...

Afterword

The scholarly study of Russian religious thought did not begin in the Englishspeaking
world before the middle of the twentieth century. If a starting point is
wanted, the best choice would be the publication of George L. Kline’s translation
of V. V. Zen’kovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy, which appeared in
1953.1 Although the title makes no reference to...

Contributors

Ruth Coates is a senior lecturer in Russian studies at the University of
Bristol, UK. She is the author of Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled
Author (1998), as well as numerous articles on the Russian intellectual tradition,
and is coeditor of Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Symposium 100 Years On
(2013). She is currently working on the reception of the doctrine of deification...

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